Blow- by-blow on spitting incident

I’ve seen Brian Ching at one of his lowest moments, and he was all class after he was a surprising omission from the U.S. men’s national team after Bob Bradley made the final cuts for the 2010 World Cup team headed to South Africa.

Ching handled that move with dignity and grace, living up to the reputation he has developed throughout the MLS and U.S. Soccer community. So in my opinion, if Brian Ching of the Houston Dynamo calls you out, you have to be somewhere above the jerk threshold.

Well, I was caught off guard Saturday afternoon when Ching called out FC Dallas defender Jair Benitez for spitting on Geoff Cameron.

Benitez definitely spit in Cameron’s face. I know that because I asked him, and he confirmed to me that he did.

Here’s what happened in the incident, according to Geoff Cameron, the one who would know.

“I was trying to push (David) Ferreira back a little bit,” Cameron said of the tussling inside the 18-yard box. “It was a free kick. It was just one of those things where (Benitez) just wanted to get involved in the game a little bit and try to start talking a little bit and then tried to square up to me.

“I said, ‘If you’re going to do something, do something.’ Then he spit in my face. It was very unprofessional. He’s known about that around the league. I was a bigger man and he didn’t do anything.”

Afterward, I went to the FC Dallas locker room to get Benitez’s side and to ask if he really spit Cameron in the face.

In Spanish I said, the Dynamo are saying that you spit Geoff Cameron in the face. Is that true?

“No, he also spit me,” Benitez told the Chronicle in Spanish. “That’s why I spit him, but it’s because he spit. He’s a player that was telling me about everything. That’s why he spit me and I also spit him.”

There’s the “he said, she said” part of it.

But as far as I’m concerned, I’m going to believe Ching and Cameron on this one. Why else would Ching hope MLS officials would look into the matter?

“I think he’s a dirty player,” Ching said. “We don’t need that type of player in this league. He’s a good player. But you definitely don’t need that extra antic on the field. There’s no room for it.”

Fortunately for Benitez, the game wasn’t on television.

Fortunately for Cameron and Ching, they didn’t take out their disdain for FC Dallas quite like Ricardo Clark did in 2007 when the former Dynamo player kicked Carlos Ruiz and drew a nine-game suspension and $10,000 fine.

Clark lost his cool and it cost him a chance to play in the playoffs as the Dynamo marched toward their second consecutive MLS Cup title.